FreeBSD MySQL still WAY slower than Linux

[Steve Roome]

Thank you all for your suggestions on this thread, here's a brief
breakdown of most of the ideas from people:

Billy Newsom: COMPILER, DISK, MYSQLVERSION
Daniel Eischen: +/-HTT, Thread scopes
Greg Lehey: MALLOC
Guy Helmer: PREEMPTIVE, vfs.read_max
Jon Dama: David Xu's Thrds, Ptmalloc, cpu affinity, sched+hwcacheing
Kris Kennaway: +/-HTT
Robert Watson: Thread scopes, LIBTHR/Linuxthr on 5 and 6?, LOCKING,
               HTT, SMP/UP
Thomas Hurst: FreeBSD-current, Don't overload mysql!
Vladimir Chukharev: COMPILEOPTS, TABLETYPES
Xin Li: PROFILE, HTT insignificant

The bad news is that I've not managed to get very far at all lately as
MySQL has been crashing too much to even stop and test stuff
elsewhere.

The good news though, is that the Mysql folks have agreed to setup
tests to profile mysql on identical hardware running FreeBSD and Linux
with an aim to find out exactly where the problem really is. They
reckon they'll spend at least two weeks trying to find out why Linux
is so much faster - if they do this right I'd be surprised if we can't
improve things quite a lot.

Also, it'd be good if any of you who still have an interest in this
could add any ideas or suggestions that may help *them* with their
testing. If so, just get in touch with me asap before they get too
stuck into anything that might prove fruitless.

Here's hoping we can get MySQL running as well on FreeBSD as it ought
to.

Thanks again everyone,

        Steve Roome